


Looking At You Now, You Would Never Know

by ivanolix



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon - TV, Depression, Gen, Gen Fic, Male-Female Friendship, POV Female Character, Psychological Trauma, Rape/Non-con References, References to Suicide, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-19
Updated: 2011-12-19
Packaged: 2017-11-03 13:34:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/381873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivanolix/pseuds/ivanolix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can't hate when you're empty, and not-hate is as good a start as anything. AU set just post-Cain arc.<br/>For sunshine_queen as an early birthday present. I tried to make it shippier but the characters protested and said it'd be a longer journey than that. Hope you enjoy!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Looking At You Now, You Would Never Know

  
Something about death, even temporary death, left the blood sluggish. Lee had nightmares, shadows that fluttered away as soon as he opened his eyes. He’d gasp, heart pounding. But though the sweat soaked his tanks and sleep left a bitter taste on his tongue, he still ached and did not feel roused. Fear could not ignite his senses, only exhaust him. Fight or flight no longer worked.

He lived on caffeine pills and military protocol.

A little voice inside of him whispered _depression, depression_. He denied it. Insidious and unstoppable, it ate at his control anyways and sapped his strength. Lee hadn’t wanted to come back to life; he hadn’t expected it or begged for it. That didn’t seem likely to change. But everything else, the crushing weight of all that meant, was denied victory. With both stubbornness and fear, he fought back.

Weakness led to cravings that he only half understood. Dee’s eyes were too soft and brown, too guarded and yet too caring, for him to lose himself in them. So he was thankful that a little bit of all humanity had survived—even the professions no one talked about.

Shevon was soft and hard all at once, and she let him frak her with desperation and not explain anything. She even stroked his hair afterwards, and he didn’t have to pay her until the very last minute. Lee felt primal and alive. He felt dirty and broken.

He’d barely buttoned up his jacket when he caught sight of flat dark-blonde hair, and gave a double-take for the tall bony frame. The Cylon woman at first seemed like a ghost coming from his nightmares, but Lee blinked and she didn’t disappear. Instead she met his eyes for a harsh second, then melted into the crowd like a rabbit gone to brush.

Lee couldn’t decide if he felt fear or anger. Hatred would have been easier.

“Wait!” he called, not caring who recognized him in this sector of the ship.

No one paid any attention, except the Cylon who moved faster.

Like something from a dream, Lee chased her down a dead-end corridor until there was no one left, only shadows and an empty room. He followed her in and she turned to face him, then, very real after all.

“You’re a Six,” he breathed, hand on his hip.

“Gina,” she corrected, like cold iron. Like titanium bolts and computer chips, and ones and zeros.

Thin, almost sallow, with many barely-visible scars along her skin—yes, Lee knew her. The Six from the Pegasus. Traitor and yet... They’d all heard the stories. Even if they hadn’t, Lee could see the truth in her eyes. The damage.

Gina gazed at him with eyes that had no answers. Any moment she might snap in two—or snap him in two. It was the gaze of a survivor, and Lee had seen it in the eyes of a thousand men and women since the day the Colonies fell.

He’d drawn his pistol before realizing that he had, but his trigger finger froze. “I can’t,” he whispered without explanation.

Something flickered in her dead eyes as she stood, unanswering, and at last she took a step forward. “Would it help if I closed my eyes?” she asked, with the barrel of his pistol resting against her forehead. She was taller than him and yet looked small now.

It was worse that way, when she stood close and he could see her pulse under that thin skin. A damaged machine or a damaged human...Lee couldn’t tell the difference and it made him want to scream.

Gina didn’t tell him to shoot, but her eyes demanded it.

Lee could only turn away and not look back.

-

With the resurrection ship gone, Gina saw death around every corner. Like an old friend it was, and yet ever out of reach. The young Adama came close and then flinched at the final moment.

Gina would never see him again, she knew in her gut as he hurried away.

Two weeks later, Lee knocked at her door, weaponless and with empty eyes. When she opened it without hesitation, he blinked as if completely caught off guard.

He’d come without his military jacket, but Gina could imagine how one would sit on his shoulders. The military came with a certain weight to it, and a guarding behind the eyes. Dead eyes. Flawed, she told herself now, with sickening memories as evidence. Surely the genocide had been worth it. Bitterness swelled in her throat and made her clench her hands so tight it felt like the bones would crack.

They didn’t, and she said aloud, “Lee Adama, am I right?”

Still in her doorway, he stood with hands at his sides. “You’re a Cylon.”

Gina didn’t deign to answer that.

“May I come in?”

He was weaponless and alone, and there was a deepset pain in his eyes that she recognized from her own face in the mirror. For that reason alone, she nodded, and shut the door on the two of them.

-

“I killed the Admiral,” she said on their first visit.

“I don’t care,” he answered and meant it.

She looked at him, as if her look would tear away his disguise and show him for the alien he truly was. Turnabout is fair play, Lee told himself, and tried not to stare back.

Like the other Cylons he’d seen, she had a fresh, clean-lined kind of beauty. Gina looked more worn and gaunt, but still hauntingly perfect. She didn’t walk the same, though. No smooth movements, no swift surety. Flesh and bone had flaws, and Gina bore them as any human Lee had ever beheld.

More human than human, almost, and the treachery in that thought sent a shiver down his spine.

“You aren’t afraid of me,” she said then, taking a seat and laying her hands over her crossed knees.

“You’re wrong.” Lee met her eyes then, though he didn’t stare.

She had eyes that were too familiar and too strange. Minutes passed like hours, and Lee felt weary. Neither of them knew why he was here. Perhaps he least of them both. Life, which had once been about killing Cylons, seemed unsure when faced with her. With Gina.

Silence filled the tiny room until she uncrossed her legs. “Tea?”

Lee swallowed, nodded, and allowed himself to fall into the unsurety. It was even easier than dying had been.

-

“Are you going to turn me in?” she asked as he walked past her, the fourth time he’d knocked on her door and she’d let him in.

“Are you going to snap my neck?” Lee had such piercing eyes, even when clouded by darkness.

Gina found herself smiling without humor. “Tea?” she offered.

Sitting in silence, her cradling a warm cup of tea and he holding his as if it might bite him, they sipped and sipped again until the tea was gone. The room’s air smelled of it, grassy and warm. Like home--except that Gina had never lived in that home, only projected it. She served them another cup, and Lee whispered thanks without meeting her eyes.

The silence seemed thicker with every second, saturated with questions they couldn’t ask. Lee drained his second cup and rose too quickly, almost knocking over his seat as he went for the door.

“Do you hope that I’ll kill you?” Gina asked. She didn’t rise, only watched him turn and look confused. “Every time you visit, are you hoping that I’ll end the charade? Kill you before you can blink?”

To his credit he didn’t flinch. His voice, hoarse despite the tea, shattered the remaining silence. “No more than you do.”

She cocked her head and rolled the words in her mouth. At last she said with a flat voice and smile, “Come back any time, Lee Adama.”

-

It was easy to hate the Cylons. Gina, on the other hand, seemed to draw the hate from him like poison from a wound. It left him feeling weak but clean. Lee felt ashamed every time he left, but the shame was nothing compared to the weight of living. Day after day, the hopelessness still ate at his soul. Life seemed only the precursor to death these days, and Lee was tired.

Dee made him smile for a while on their little awkward dates, too many doubts and unspoken words present to be quite happy. Kara made him forget, in that way that had him frustrated and angry and yet focused for once.

Gina was a Cylon, and yet she made him feel _human_.

“Did you want to carry out your mission?” he asked once, even as he handed her a cup of the weak green tea that was all the fleet had anymore.

She licked her pale lips and shook her head. “Want had nothing to do with it. I believed it was the right thing to do. For everyone.”

For every Cylon, she meant but didn’t say. Yet no revulsion filled him. Lee stared into the tea and then back at Gina.

“It wasn’t until later that I _wanted_ them all dead.”

There was the crux of it, and like a filthy traitor Lee felt every word. The horror, the anger, the sense of justice. It wasn’t his place to care, but he did. “If you had a chance now, would you kill the rest?”

“Yes. Wouldn’t you?”

Lee swallowed hard. “Yes. We’d like to think otherwise, but revenge is the only truly human reaction there is.”

It was Gina who flinched at that, not him. Her fingers gripped tighter around the cup, knuckles white.

He watched, and his words faltered. “You...you don’t like that you look human. That you feel like one.” They weren’t questions.

“I’m not one. That’s the _point_.” Her voice barely trembled.

“I know.” Lee set the teacup down on the table and lowered his head to his hands. Quieter, slowly, he said again, “I know.”

What was human, if it was not the ability to be hurt and to feel it? What was human if it was not fear and guilt and wanting to die? If Gina wasn’t human, then what was Lee if he could see an all too familiar emptiness in her eyes?

A few moments passed, then her voice spoke again. “Maybe you should leave. You aren’t here for me, you’re here because you think I’m the catalyst. You’re falling apart, and I’m supposed to be the final straw. I don’t want to, Lee. I’m...tired of being used.”

That hurt, and even more because it was true. Lee nodded, throat too tight for words, and got up to leave. “I’m sorry,” he whispered without saying what for. Perhaps he meant for everything.

-

For a day or two, Gina wondered if he would come back. She told herself that she wouldn’t open the door to him. It was like looking into a mirror to see his eyes, and then she had to fight back tears. No matter how she tried to turn the emotions off, they flooded her system.

Part of her longed for the collective and her sisters. Perhaps in their warm pure love she might find oblivion after death, and rest after a life that had felt like eternity. It hadn’t been—just a few short years.

Yet though there were a thousand ways to die around her—a thousand ways to return home—she kept living her life. Quiet. Empty. Waiting.

She didn’t realize that she was waiting for a purpose until a week later. Lee finally reappeared. Lips pressed together in a firm line, she found one and opened the door only a crack. “I meant what I said before.”

“I know,” he said. “And I’m sorry.”

Gina stared at him. “What?”

He handed her a small sachet of tea. “I don’t know what you are, but I don’t want to hurt you, and I won’t. Not anymore.”

The helpless awkward look in his eyes reminded her of Gaius Baltar for a moment. The hope in the back of them, slim and fading, reminded her that the two were different. She accepted the tea and didn’t close the door. “What are you looking for, Lee?”

“Nothing,” he said with a sigh. “I suppose that’s the problem.”

It was such a soft admission, but it made the tension in her hands relax. “Come in,” she said, barely audible, and opened the door a few more inches. “But only if you promise not to sit in silence.”

Lee blinked. “Why?”

Gina shrugged. “Sitting alone is finally worse the alternative.”

Confusion mingled with a little understanding, and he nodded, swallowed. “I suppose...I belong here more than anywhere else.”

She didn’t answer, but let him enter and then shut the door. “Tea?”

He looked up with a pained smile. “It’s becoming tradition.”

“It is.” Gina walked over to heat the kettle, and then sat on the couch across from him. “Now talk to me. Just talk.”

“About?”

She shook her head, exhaled softly. “Anything. Tell me what it feels like for you, to want to die but not enough for you to act.”

His not-quite-smile returned, and then he began to speak, with all the words she’d never learned how to use. The kettle sang shrilly, her heart beat with blood, and Gina lost herself in a new kind of oblivion. Listening.

She could have sworn after a few minutes that Lee forgot he was speaking aloud. A few minutes after that, he seemed to forget that she wasn’t human.

Gina played along, and forgot she wasn’t human too. Not human, not Cylon, just an empty vessel looking for a purpose.

He ran out of words eventually, and nothing was really changed. “Oh,” she said, barely more than a whisper.

“It feels the same for you.”

She nodded, and cradled her teacup. “It’s not the smartest evolution, I suppose.”

“I thought Cylons were perfect.” Lee sipped his tea, then met her eyes.

Gina shrugged. “Apparently not.”

“Maybe that’s the only way to live.”

“Maybe.”

For a moment the silence returned. Then he said, “You want to feel like living again, don’t you.”

She laughed, a thin not-laugh that almost hurt. But he was right, and so she met his eyes and said, “Have I ever been alive?”

“That’s a good question,” was all he said, and took another sip of tea. “For us both.”

There was still an ache in her bones as she sat, and the price of consciousness in this broken body was high. Almost too high. Yet though they shared that same burden of life, it felt a fraction less heavy with Lee in the room. For that, she drained her cup and said. “Come back any time, Lee Adama.”

She could see in his eyes that he knew that the offer came with a different meaning now.

-

During the next visit she gave him a deck of cards. “Teach me how,” she demanded, with no further explanation.

Lee beat her the first hand. She trounced him the second time. A remark about her advantage with having a mechanical mind was bitten back before it could escape. Since the hand after that, Lee beat her again, it was a doubly wise choice.

“Normally this game isn’t played with two people,” Lee said, shrugging as he dealt another hand. The slick sound of cards against each other was all that could be heard apart from their breathing. Gina’s compartment always had a space-like silence to it. “Chess is a more traditional option.” The words had no meaning, just trivial knowledge to keep from the silence she had forbade.

“Chess is too much like war,” Gina said, lips pursed as she cut the deck.

It was truth, and Lee gave a wordless nod.

Gina picked up the hand she’d been dealt and arranged it neatly, but not perfectly.

Lee watched the way her long fingers held the cards, fascinated at the imperfections of everything she did, until he realized he was staring. Guilt stabbed him then, and he cleared his throat. “If chess is war, what does that make triad?”

“A dance,” Gina murmured, eyes on her hand and tone distracted.

Lee’s lips quirked in a smile, and when her eyes met his he could almost imagine that they reflected the same appreciation of the metaphor.

-

Escape. It was the word she’d once yearned for with the heat of every sun in the Twelve Colonies. It was a word she’d left behind in a metal cell, useless and trite. In the end, Gina could not even count on death for release. Escape meant nothing.

Save for this. Lee, a paradox of sincerity and guardedness all in one, brought with him a sense of emptiness. Not the cold dark kind, but the magnificence of space itself, that which made the hybrids’ eyes smile. Once Gina had meditated with some of her sister Sixes and brother Twos, communing with the vastness of the universe. God was in that space, she’d believed then. That belief had been ripped from her, yet a solitary awe in the wide distance between stars still dwelt in the corners of her mind.

Lee was like that. The blue-black of space, and the distant white specks of stars; the shimmer of far-off galaxies and the noiseless peace of the cradle of the universe. For the times when they sat and spoke, free from expectations and the need to be, Gina finally escaped every pressure she’d ever known. Scars didn’t make their presence known when you were weightless.

“You’re so different,” he said once, shaking his head as if it meant nothing.

Gina cradled the words close to her heart, painful as they were, and sipped her tea. “It’s why I don’t want to go back,” she said in barely more than a whisper. “It’s like Leoben always said. This is not all we are.”

To her relief--though why she was still surprised she couldn’t explain, except perhaps with the word habit--Lee nodded. Eyes on his hands as he absently traced the design on his cup, speaking as if half to himself. “My father once told me something similar. Back when he believed it, anyways. I complained about my name and he said, _you must be more than your name or you are no one_. I have to be more than Leland. You have to be more than Gina.”

Gina swallowed her tea and wondered if this was what unique felt like. It wasn’t pleasant, either to be alone or to be so under such circumstances, yet she was finally owning her name and that was something.

Escape wasn’t happiness, but it was an answer to hope all the same.

-

They ran out of tea at some point, and Lee had to search nearly the entire black market to find any. “It’s the best quality,” the woman assured him, with a toothy smile as she handed him the tiny packet. “Will blow your mind.”

Honestly Lee was only looking for something that didn’t taste grassy, but he accepted the hyperbole.

“More tea,” she said with a faint smile as he handed it to her.

“It’s tradition.” Not the only one, he noted as they gave the same not-quite-smiles, took the same seats, and the room smelt of tea and relaxation. Better than booze and cards with the other pilots any day.

The tea tasted different, but at least it wasn’t stale grass. “She said it would be mindblowing,” Lee huffed, half rolling his eyes.

“They always do,” she answered, and it wasn’t mocking or awkward anymore.

A lot of things seemed to have changed, as in a matter of minutes she had progressed from smiling to giggling, and it was infectious enough that Lee found it hard to breathe. Sharing a laugh with a Cylon. It was a sweet odd madness.

Then suddenly it was hours later, and Lee was staring up at the ceiling in a daze. Frak. He could remember giggling, more giggling, and the sensation that he was flying. Then the world had flipped upside down and he was watching it turn above him in the hairline cracks of the ceiling. Drugged. The tea had been drugged.

"Frak it all," he mumbled to himself.

Then he heard the whimper.

Gina's voice sounded like a child's. Lee sat bolt upright, realizing it was her thigh he was pillowed against. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut, but every limb was limp as if she was playing dead. The pulse in her neck was as fast as her breathing was shallow.

"I'm sorry," he whispered suddenly, pulling away. "I didn't mean--"

She moved suddenly, curling her knees to her chest and resting her chin between them. "Don't."

Lee didn't understand but held his tongue. Unable to look away, unable to process the sudden lump in his throat, he merely held still and stared. He shouldn't have stared. Gina shivered, each breath short and sounding pained. Still he stared.

Then he looked down to realize his hand was gripping his thigh. The realization that he wanted to hold her, comfort her, made his stomach flip. This had gone too far. He had to leave this woman, who was a Cylon and his enemy, before...before...

Quickly sucking in a breath, Lee rose to his feet. "I'll go."

"No," she blurted out. "I don't want to be alone."

Helpless, Lee looked down at her, saw the normally-strong shoulders tremble for a moment. Her eyes didn't meet his, and he wondered if she was crying. _Machines don't cry; machines don't hurt._ "I don't know what to do," he said, voice quiet and frustrated.

"Don't leave," she said, and scooted up to a seat. She wrapped a jacket around her shoulders and poured a glass of water.

Lee took the seat opposite, and swallowed hard. "I suppose I'm already late for my shift," he said and let out his breath.

She didn't smile or laugh, but a little of the frailness left her stance. There was something to be said for that, and he was grateful.

-

A week passed without Lee coming for a visit. Self-conscious, Gina at once found it odd and inevitable. She'd disturbed him but more importantly, now she was a burden. He'd stayed for a few hours, quiet but there, because she asked him too and it would have been too awkward to decline. But avoiding...no, that wasn't awkward at all.

Lee would never again be seen on her doorstep, of that Gina was sure.

The quiet made her want to laugh and cry, and so she began talking to herself to fill it. For hours she paced, talking about the loneliness, the nightmares, the promise that was the nuclear bomb beneath her bed. Heart racing at times, she would go so far as to kneel and lift the sheets to look at the bomb, wondering if she should give up. Each time she'd finally shake her head, turn, rise to her feet and walk across the room. "Pathetic," she'd whisper to the air. "I've become pathetic."

It had seemed an idle fancy to have someone to talk to. She couldn't have said that Lee made her happy, or even entertained her, but his absence was an itch she couldn't scratch. Gina tried to turn off the feeling by staring out the window and dissolving into the blackness of space. She failed, though, and her consciousness remained rooted in this warm, scarred, human body.

A knock came on the door after eight days of this restlessness. The note, short and sweet, was in a hand she'd never seen before and yet knew on sight. _I should have guessed that the tea wasn't tea. I'm sorry for what happened._

Gina cocked her head, running her thumb over the printed words, confused. At last she bit back a tiny laugh. She wrote a note of her own, signing it merely Gina, and made sure it got on its way to the CIC.

It was half a day before Lee made his way to her room. "Come in," she said when opening the door.

"I thought—"

She put a finger to her lips and he fell silent. "It's much easier when we don't act awkward."

"Is it?"

He looked like a lost puppy. Not that Gina had ever seen one, but she understood the idiom and it fit the man before her perfectly. For the first time she realized that she was taller than him, and that there was no hardness in his face. Like Gaius, she might have said, only without that man's weakness. Gina found herself smiling, her lips stretching in an unfamiliar curve. "Will you have a cup of water? I don't have tea..."

He gave a pained laugh. "No...no, I don't suppose you'd want to keep that."

Just like that, the old ways were back. Gina let her fingertips brush lightly against his hand as she gave him the glass of water, the only gesture of trust she could allow herself. Then, an indescribable burden lifted from her shoulders, she sat opposite him. "Do you read?"

Lee blinked. "I used to." A frown then, awkward but quickly shaken off.

"Tell me about your favorite book," she said, and rested her hands over her knees.

A far-away look flitted across his eyes, and then he murmured, "The Price of Humanity by Al'a Jarid. It's like the gods himself put the meaning of life into words..."

Gina listened, and her smile didn't fade. Neither did his.

Hope, or something like it, was theirs again.


End file.
